I've moved our conversation here out of the financial thread, as this is interesting, but totally off-topic for the other discussion.
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Also, I'll take a moment here to remind everyone that my statements are my own. They do not represent any opinion at CDPR, and I am not speaking for the studio. If I do need to do something official, you'll see blue text, like so.
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Not quite sure I agree there. By definition, hype means extravagant and intensive publicity/promotion.
The market shows, by default, intentionally overpromoted products tend to stop the marketing campaigns exactly when the product releases. The truth unveils to the public, rendering previous marketing attempts as exaggerated/untrue. Continuous hype lives past the release and gets further carried by the happy customer, willing to spread whatever goodness they found. This requires overwhelming amounts of fulfilled expectations, which i think weren't the case this time.
I still disagree. It's impossible to validate exactly where a product becomes "over-promoted". That's entirely subjective, based on a large number of variables that are all outside of CDPR's control. This is always up to the consumer base. There have been numerous games that didn't have any advertising campaign worth mentioning, and they went completely viral entirely on their own merits. Look at Farmville, Minecraft, or Valheim. We've also had studios that invested heavily in very aggressive advertising campaigns, and few players even looked in their direction. Consider Too Human, Haze, or Homefront.
No studio is responsible for how much excitement their advertising generates. No studio is responsible for players' preferences or the way they choose to define subjective terminology, like "immersive", "next-gen", or "role-playing". Expectations are up to the individual. Trying to superimpose personal ideology onto someone else's words is guilty of the fallacies of both hasty generalization and false dilemma. There is no universal definition for terms like this, and the listener's interpretation does not automatically overrule the speaker's interpretation.
Here, many people like to go toward an argument of, "Oh -- come on! Now you're just trying to cover your tracks!! This is all bullshit, and you @#$%!ng know it!!!" Etc. Technically, that's a forfeit, offering a win for logic and reason right there, and it's why arguments like that never go anywhere. It's also largely why terms like "state-of-the-art", "groundbreaking", "revolutionary", etc. continue to be used with abandon in advertisements --
because they're inherently undefined, sound impressive, people expect to hear them, and no one tends to argue against them with any sustained sense or reason.
Let me now take a break and become critical of this type of advertising. I don't approve of it. I always suggest steering away from it. I made a pretty focused argument against using the words "...maximize your immersion..." to explain why the game was being switched to FPP only, as I knew full well many people would misinterpret the meaning. And if it was meant to mean, "You'll enjoy it more, player!", that would be too pretentious and assumptive of a stance, likely to generate more backlash than either understanding or excitement.
I'm a proponent of advertising for specific targeted audiences. It's not possible to appeal to everyone, and trying to do so will always leave some percentage of players disappointed. Better, in my estimation, to market to the people that will want your product. If I'm selling the finest seared steaks on the planet...let's not pretend that my vegetarian options are also top notch. Vegetarians are probably going to walk away from my restaurant unhappy with their meal. Best to advertise my steaks prominently and indirectly let the vegetarians know that this probably isn't a place they'll love. If they do show up anyway, they probably won't be expecting asparagus tempura crafted by the hands of angels...and they're likely to enjoy their fairly simple 3-bean salad without complaint. This type of advertising takes a
lot of confidence, though. And especially when investors are involved, it's not likely to pass a board. They'll want to play it safe and just create "general appeal" to ensure the most return on their investments.
You can't escape this if you want to stay in business at that level. This is a "Welcome to Earth" type of concern.
The customers perception is as responsible for their reasonable expectations, as the foundation it's getting built on. Every action causes a reaction. Every reaction is getting observed, and if the following action is taking advantage of previous behavior patterns, it's clearly targeted to do so. This is the definition of overpromoting.
One can't just make the customers fully responsible for their expectations and call it a day. I mean one can, but one really shouldn't.
You're fighting gravity here. This isn't CDPR -- this is
marketing in general. This is what marketing is. This is how advertising works. This is what all advertising is like, regardless of product, service, or consumer base. No company is going to intentionally undersell itself. All companies are going to try to make themselves out to be the best option. No product or service is "the best ever" -- that's
subjective. I don't care how amazing a company's reputation is or how many people are singing their praises; I will be able to find you
thousands of dissatisfied customers. I don't care how awful a company's reputation is, or how many people are thronging the internet to flame and bash them; I will find you
thousands of people that are loyal and satisfied customers. (Biting into
that for purposes of analyzing a product would be
hype. That's what
hype is.)
It is the consumer's responsibility to be educated about the industry and their purchases. It is the consumer's responsibility to be able to differentiate between fact and interpretation. It is the consumer's responsibility to make an educated purchase. It is the consumer's responsibility to identify their
subjective reactions to the product as such -- not superimpose their subjectivity as if it were fact simply because others happen to agree with them. It is entirely possible for 100,000 angry people to be completely groundless in their arguments. We see it all the time, actually. (I call it "the internet".)
The issue here that will hold water is if a product is guilty of
false advertising. And CP2077 was absolutely
not false advertising.
Hype is not false advertising -- it's irresponsible focus on the part of the consumer. The game is exactly what it was always advertised as being. For some people, it simply wasn't "enough of" or "as good as" they
subjectively wanted it to be. That's on them, not the studio. No one was forced to buy the game. Everyone was offered a return policy. That return policy was even extended for last-gen consoles. (Which was totally warranted, and I'm not going to defend that part of the release. That was a mess, and I was very happy to see CDPR's reaction and Iwinski's message. That was a prime example of the studio's tenacity to do what was right on top of all they were dealing with at that point.)
The major, ongoing issue is that some people simply wanted the moon. They hyped the advertisements up in their own mind. They ignored the clearly written and stated, "What you are seeing is a work-in-progress. / Everything you see is subject to change." They superimposed their own, subjective interpretations onto the language used. They continued to hype it up, of their own volition, and/or they fed on the hype others were generating outside of the official marketing. They then received something that didn't live up to their subjective desires.
At this point comes the great challenge of life that people will learn to face, or they're in for a very rocky existence. Things don't always work out the way we want or expect. Period. Sometimes, the best laid plans will go awry, or unforeseen factors will dash our dreams to dust in front of our eyes. (A global pandemic during the busiest period of production left many people at CDPR feeling exactly the same thing, I'm very sure.) Mistakes can be made...bad calls can happen...and the final product may not be what was originally envisioned.
Let me be honest again -- I didn't feel the game was blow-my-mind incredible, overall. I loved the city itself -- it's an amazingly well-developed world! The level of detail is astounding. I find the storyline riveting, and the characters, especially Johnny, to be complex, engaging, and polished to a fine sheen. I found combat to be lackluster. Things like driving were not very gracefully implemented. Plenty of stuff, like random encounters, police response, fast-travel, and so forth felt like placeholders. It took a lot of work to getting the game running well (even if it worked just fine in the end). And there were still loooooots of bugs.
See, I expected nothing more, really. I've never, not once in my life, picked up a huge RPG of this scale and had it work smoothly out-of-the-box. Every Bethesda game I've ever played (which is all of them) took
years of patching to be playable without significant issues. Every Bioware title had a few big issues that needed to be ironed out. I can go all the way back to Ultima VII and the weeks and weeks of work it took for me to write a config.sys and autoexec.bat file that would work properly with Origin's Voodoo Memory Manager. I can go even further back to needing to manually dump the "above-board-memory" (RAM) in my Commodore 64 so that Sword of Fargoal wouldn't randomly quit. Expectations are easy to temper once one is familiar with reality vs. expectations.
As for CP2077:
Is it an RPG? Absolutely. And I can source numerous other titles that show exactly the same gameplay mechanics that are called "RPGs". Is it a huge, open world? Yes, it is. Way bigger and more detailed than many games I can compare it to. Does it offer freedom of choice and play style? 100%. There are many titles I can cite that don't offer nearly as much horizontal freedom or depth. Does it feature incredible graphics? Yup! The city looks divine on my PC. If it doesn't look as good on console or lower end hardware, that's to be expected, as can be proven by comparing any number of titles side-by-side. But what about all the changed or cut features? Yeah. That's what happens during a game's production. There are endless examples of this that can be cited from decades of video game design.
But -- did it live up to
my expectations, based on what
I was interpreting the marketing to mean, because of what
I and a huge number of
other players decided the game was supposed to be? Well...ah...that's entirely up to the individual. No one ever promised perfection...and no one ever claimed that everyone would like it. Some people didn't. A lot of people didn't, I guess. That's disappointing.
It was a bit rough at the end there, when everything needed to come together. Work is ongoing to fix issues! Return policies are available, as always. You've played the game -- it's your decision. If you keep it, hopefully you'll like it more in the future! If not, well, that's understandable. It will always be there for purchase if you change your mind!
What? What else??? What more is there? Expecting anything other than the freedom to return the game is overstepping and crossing lines in so many ways that it would be almost impossible to list them all. CDPR is not responsible for assumptions, interpretations, or imaginings in people's minds. In the future, I'd recommend, very strongly, not to engage in any form of "hype". It's not a responsible way to analyze or make decisions.
If a company loses 63% of it's net worth mere few months after a product gets released, no amounts of strong arguments can prove the customer wrong. Money talks.
And this is a red herring. For a lot of reasons, in this case, that has nothing to do with the quality of the game. Being publicly traded means that you're putting that portion of your company up for grabs on a market that is not known for either its stability nor its honor. The stock market is viciously cut-throat, and without going into too much detail here, all it takes, sometimes, is a single person with selfish intent that's willing to throw everyone else involved under the bus for their own, personal gain.
This is why I would always want to avoid offering public shares for any company I ever owned. Better to be small and stable than go for the big cash and risk something like that. All a matter of what you really want out of life.
But, no, the stock market drop had absolutely nothing to do with "how bad the game was". The major drop occurred
before the game was released. As stated in the other thread, the game sold 13.7 million copies. That revenue didn't simply vanish into thin air. It's fine.